Counterfeiting, warranty fraud, product tampering, smuggling, product diversion and other forms of organized deception are driving the need for improved brand protection. Securitized printing and imaging may provide forensic level authentication to form part of a general approach to product and document security.
One level of forensic analysis of printed material including documents, packaging and labels is device forensics/ballistics, where a document (or set of documents) is analyzed to see if it was printed on a specific device or class of devices. A second level of forensic analysis is print forensics, where individual printed artifacts are uniquely identified. This allows the differentiation of individual instances of the same or highly similar documents—including high quality copies.
Individual text glyphs may be inspected using a true resolution device to create a registry for forensic identification. In some implementations a Dyson Relay CMOS Inspection Device (DrCID) may be used to make any individual printable glyph (e.g. character or symbol) a forensic mark. A DrCID device may include, for example, lens-based CMOS imaging hardware capable of high resolution (e.g., 1:1 magnification and 3.5 micron true resolution). Such device hardware may enable high-resolution scanning and may facilitate the capture of both intentional printing shapes and unintentional printing artifacts caused by the printing process and interaction of the ink with the substrate on which printing occurs.
Forensic authentication may be based on the analysis of the perimeter of threshold binary image components (e.g. over 360 degrees in one-degree bins) using a large number of profile measures, including radius. Each pair of profiles may be aligned to optimize a normalized similarity metric based on a sum of absolute differences between the pair of profiles: S=1−(SAD)/((SA1+SA2)/2), where SAD is the sum of absolute differences; and SA1 and SA2 are the sum of absolute values of the first and second profile measure respectively.